THE first proper week of January can be tricky. After two weeks of floating around in a Christmas bubble where time goes funny and is mostly measured out in Brendan O’Carroll prat falls and large, geological sections of turkey, reality sure can come crashing back when January kicks off.
With half the country in a state of Snowmageddon it’s been a rather magical, or miserable, start to the new year, all depending on your outlook of course. If the Inuits have one hundred words for snow, then we Irish have around a thousand ways to unnecessarily panic about it.
For us, it’s been a rather lovely route into 2025. After a Christmas of spluttering and high temperatures, we arrived back in Dublin for five (or six, or seven?) glorious days of doing nothing. Sleep, recovery and comfort food have been the order of the day. People often worry about retirement, saying they’d go mad if they had nothing to do but pad around the house. I say bring it on. In fact, I think I was born to laze around the house with very little respect for what day of the week it is. We are all born with different gifts, I suppose.
In some weird twist, after a Christmas to forget, I have rarely felt more upbeat and positive at the start of a new year. Of course, it’s all a trick of the calendar but an important psychological one nonetheless, which gives us a sense of a restart, however artificial. Unless of course you are absolutely allergic to January and all the fads that they try pushing on us, which is grand too.
I find it helps to tune out the noise a little bit. The news industrial complex and the social media attention span destruction complex would give you a million reasons to think 2025 will be the worst year ever. It is in their business interest to keep you in a state of mild panic from the moment you wake up in the morning.
Instead, I’ve switched it up and have been starting the new year with a focus on inspiring and heart-warming content. A case in point – Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files newsletter, which this time focuses on the subject of Hope, was like a balm to the soul when it landed in my inbox earlier in the week.
‘Hope is an emotional temper that emboldens the heart to be active,’ writes Cave. ‘It is a condition, a mood, an aura of being. It is a feat of the imagination, both courageous and ingenious, a vitality that inspires us to take innovative action to defend the world. Hope is essential to our survival and our flourishing.’ Nothing wrong with a bit of that, if you ask me.
Gold on the silver screen
IT’S been wall-to-wall films in our house since the year started. Some absolute crackers too. Gladiator II was brilliant craic, a super follow-up to the original with a decent central performance by ‘West Cork’s’ own Paul Mescal, whose GAA winter training stood to him well, as he battled sharks – of all things – in the middle of the Colosseum. There was the small and thoughtful A Real Pain for which Kieran Culkin picked up a Golden Globe. I loved Conclave, with its stellar cast of A-List bishops waging holy warfare in the attempt to appoint a new Pope.
We sometimes talk about how all the great things are in the past – music, films and sport – but this is just a selection I watched in the first week of 2025. I didn’t even mention the joy of Wallace & Gromit this Christmas and the slightly disappointing Kneecap, which is a lot less interesting than it thinks it is, but which was good craic nevertheless. And we have a list just as long to get through before we hit February. What better way to get through the January blues?
Snow shoes is good news?
ANOTHER week, another incumbent bites the dust. This time it’s the turn of Canadian Liberal leader Justin Trudeau who’s taking the long walk into the political wilderness after winning three elections since 2015. He gained global renown a decade ago for his unabashedly progressive politics, but things turned decidedly sour for him domestically. Rocked by various scandals, including an undeclared luxury vacation and some unfortunate videos from the 1990s showing him in blackface, there’s been a growing chorus asking him to ‘take a walk in the snow’ – which is exactly what his father did in February 1984 after facing calls to resign. Given the week we’ve had in Ireland, with half the country sliding around in the white stuff, it’s a metaphor we can all relate to a bit too literally at the moment.
